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Susan Slaviero: Mother & Father

Think of natural disasters as domestic, something smaller than in those movies where the beautiful blonde scientist escapes a tsunami in a well-timed helicopter with a wisecracking pilot—a love interest

to keep the story going. Instead, it’s forgotten laundry in an overfilled tub, or a smoking muffin tin tossed carelessly in the trash and covered with newspaper. The main characters are my mother and father, both living a state of permanent

brain fog, and I’m the hero, but I’m also the villain. Remember when I told you I found their pantry full of rotting potatoes and tiny insects? Who knew I could spray so much Lysol and not die of asphyxiation? I learned that every family lives

on a fault line, that sometimes earthquakes happen in the Midwest and volcanoes erupt inside desk drawers filled with unpaid taxes and half-smoked cigarettes. Should I sell the house? It feels like giving up, like wiping history off the chalkboard and forgetting civilizations

that fall also rise, but not in that order.

Early Signs

Back home, they figure omens are found in fraying curtains, those first signs of neglect.

Dad was too busy collecting teaspoons full of rain to remember to pay the bills on time, if ever.

Mom hid the collection notices, the wet, stained sheets, parked the car so the new dents wouldn’t show.

I watched the yard for ravens, counted sheets of paper and cracks in the concrete. I put fresh apples

in a bowl, but still, it was always chaos, fevers, lost debit cards, brain fog and piles of dirt.

I combed her hair, pinned a cameo brooch to her sweater and promised that gravity was a certainty, keeping

everything in place, never changing. In college, I learned it was always winter in the underworld, that I should carry lilies

and flint knives if I wanted to remain intact. A caw signifies imminent fracture, the loss of a house even

when it doesn’t rain. I’d like to buy a vowel, some consonants. I’d like to keep a blackbird in a cage, to always know

the difference between Burger King and Little Debbie. Did you know the first thing you forget is how to build a sandwich?

Bread on bread on bread, like the tower of Babel reaching halfway to the ceiling. The plate is empty. The cup is cracked

and filled, inexplicably, with dish soap.

The History of My Family
as Told by my Mother after her Dementia Diagnosis

My father wore kilts and collected maps. His job was to hunt sea monsters. Once upon a time there were leviathan in public swimming pools, a real health hazard, and somebody had to save the world.

She says she tried to teach her children about magical thinking as a means to salvation but they still grew up to be alchemists and murderers. You can tell, she says, by the dark, hooded robes found hanging behind her daughters’ wedding dresses, by the wands and scythes tucked in their cutlery drawers.

There are afternoons when the telling of this story becomes muddled with the Friday night movie and she believes we appear only in black and white, with cigarette burns in the corners of her room, and maybe I visit wearing a novelty shirt that says “The End” because I am waiting for her to die. She believes this plot originates with the birth of her second daughter. Everyone knows that middle children are often changelings.

When she was young, my mother kept dragons on the back stoop of her city apartment. Small ones, the size of kittens. Her father took them away and drowned them in an aqueduct. Irishmen are born to be cruel. He drove a truck and drank whiskey until his liver hardened and scarred over like the rock of Sisyphus. Like all fathers, he was a heavy burden. She just kept pushing him away, over and over, even after he was plucked from his bed by angels or maybe just large birds and finally stopped calling the house in a drunken stupor.

Our grandmother had tentacles and made oxtail soup. She chain-smoked until her own body was indistinguishable from cancer cells and molecules of tar. Is it any wonder our family should be descended from fallen kings and fairy women? We carry the genes for forgetting.

My Mother Escapes her Nursing Home Dressed in Sealskin

She says she’s hanging on the edge of a boat we cannot see, her hands broken, the pale bodies of beluga whales sunning themselves skimming the surface of bedsheets, grimed floors.

I promise to come back and teach her how to cast a magic spell using only kleenex and seawater. She believes she is trapped in Purgatory or the Marianas Trench.

On bad days she believes herself an archetype: a madwoman locked in the attic with nothing but spiders for company. On good days, she believes herself an Irish spy, or a Selkie— she says the nurses have stolen her skin.

They keep it folded under the stringy towels, that shiny pelt sleek and green and smelling of places she’s never been. All she needs to do is wait.

She doesn’t sleep, anyway. It will be easy to steal it back, so long as the wheelchair doesn’t squeak and the nurses doze, predictably, at the soul’s midnight.

There are mermen sleeping in coffins the next room over. She’s quite certain. She hears their tails swishing in the night, sees them slithering down the gray hallways looking for salt.

She’s grown slender to facilitate her escape. She’s gone, either to the morgue or the ocean leaving nothing but spilled saline, a shed gown, a ring of moon. One day she’s looking out the window, the next, she’s slid down the shower drain and returned to the sea.

Susan Slaviero is the author of CYBORGIA (Mayapple Press), Selections from the Murder Book (Treelight Books), and A Wicked Apple (Hyacinth Girl Press). Her work has appeared in ArsenicLobster, Jet Fuel Review, Rhino, Story Magazine and other publications. She lives and writes in the south suburbs of Chicago.

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